A family law attorney wrote me this week to say that she is looking for a way to take text messages between her client and the adverse party and present them in a format that looks good at trial — something better than just a series of screen shots. I told her that I have heard of attorneys using the Stitch It! app for this purpose, an app that aligns screenshots to produce what looks like one long screenshot. But perhaps some of you have a better way to make iPhone text messages look good at trial, and if you do, please post a comment to this post or send me an email. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- California attorney William Ha decided to give up the practice of law and write iOS apps instead. Zach Abramowitz of Above the Law interviewed Ha to find out how and why.
- California attorney David Sparks explains why he loves using his Apple Watch for walking directions. I agree 100% with that post. Although you can use the Map app on an iPhone for this purpose, when you walk around a city looking down at your iPhone as you walk, you stand out way too much. Having your watch give you silent taps to indicate which way you need to turn is so much better, and safer — not only to avoid looking like a target, but also so that you can pay attention to where you are walking and don’t bump into a person, a pole, etc.
- Florida attorney Ware Cornell talks about using the TrialPad app with Scannable in a post on The Mac Lawyer.
- John Paczkowski of BuzzFeed reports that Apple is removing from the App Store apps that use the Confederate flag in offensive or mean-spirited ways.
- Dan Moren of Six Colors reports that in iOS 9, apps will be able to “Save as PDF” instead of printing.
- Jonny Evans of ComputerWorld identifies twelve other useful features in iOS 9.
- The 1Password app — a fantastic password manager — is a free app, but there is normally a $9.99 in-app purchase to get all of the features. But there is currently a sale so you can pay only $4.99 in-app to get all of the pro features.
- Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal reviews the new Nest Cam, a high-resolution camera that you place in your house so that you can monitor your house from your iPhone wherever you are.
- David Pogue of Yahoo Tech also reviews the Nest Cam.
- John Moltz of A Very Nice Website reports that if you have a foreign language keyboard in use on your iPhone, then your Apple Watch will give you foreign language default replies to text messages.
- Serenity Caldwell of iMore wrote a comprehensive FAQ on what we know about watchOS 2, which is coming out this Fall.
- And finally, for those of you who remember using System 7 on a Mac in the 1990s, developer Nick Lee figured out a way to get it running on an Apple Watch. Useful? Not at all. Cool? You bet! Here is the video:
On your question of how to make text messages from iDevices presentable in court, you should try iExplorer. It allows you, in conjunction with iTunes, to backup the device and gives you complete access to everything contained therein. Export the SMS messages to PDF and you end up with a complete and presentable record. We use it all of the time.
With iExplorer, you can even harvest voice messages that had been deleted, but still reside on the iPhone. Check it out.
Another attorney has suggested checking out Tansee iPhone/iPad/iPod SMS&MMS&iMessage Transfer — http://www.tansee.com/iphonetransfersms.html — saying that it isn’t perfect but it can be made to work.
-Jeff
Federico Viticci discussed two apps that do a good job of stitching screen shots together: LongScreen and Tailor.
I’ve tried them both, I reckon LongScreen does a better job of detecting and stitching screens together, and also handles the colour-gradient change (where messages turn darker as they are displayed at the bottom of the screen). But, Tailor does a better job of cleaning up the screenshots (if that sort of thing is important to you). A good workaround is to use the capture-the-screen-while-plugged-in-with-QuickTime-running method discussed by StatusMagic in its blog. (Sadly, StatusMagic was discontinued.)
But, anytime I’ve needed to show messages and the like for court use, I prefer grabbing the message thread using something like eCamm’s PhoneView, Macroplant’s iExplorer or iMazing.
The benefit of these programs is they will download a message thread, convert it to PDF, and — most importantly for court-room use — display next to each message the date and time the message was sent. Screen shots from an iPhone or iPad won’t show this last important detail.
When I need to capture message threads, I ask my clients to bring their device in, and ask for their permission to connect and extract the relevant thread. It also allows me the chance to backup the relevant messages. (I don’t know if you’re ever experienced the client complaint, “I lost my phone!”, or, “I accidentally deleted my messages!”)
These programs can also download and store voicemails too: another useful feature for lawyers.
Kyle, these are great suggestions. Thanks so much!
-Jeff